Trump's 'Toshakhana under scrutiny' as $10M cash withdrawal from Egypt drove a brief probe

A bombshell report has revealed that Former US President Donald Trump allegedly received a whopping $10 million from Egypt just five days before he assumed office in January 2017. According to a report by The Washington Post, a secret investigation was conducted by the US Department of Justice over the matter.

As per the report, the federal investigators learned about the withdrawal in early 2019 which triggered a secret criminal investigation over the matter. The probe started after US intelligence alleged that Egyptian President Abdel Fatah El-Sisi sought to give Trump $10 million to boost his 2016 presidential campaign.

However, the case will never see the light of day again since within months of discovering the information, the case ground to a halt by the fall of 2019 as Trump’s then-attorney general, William P. Barr, raised doubts about whether there was sufficient evidence to continue the probe against the then-president.

What made the case concerning was the fact that it came at a time when Trump was accusing the department of pursuing a politically biased “witch hunt” against him in its probe of Russia’s interference in the 2020 polls.

This begs the question; is the United States’ electoral system that vulnerable to foreign interference?

The Team 10 conundrum 

According to the documents obtained by The Washington Post, a manager at the National Bank of Egypt in Cairo received a letter from an organisation which was linked to the intelligence service. In the letter, the bank was asked to “kindly withdraw” nearly $10 million from the organization’s account — all in cash.

The records from the bank showed that four men arrived and carried away the bags, which US officials described in sealed court filings as weighing a combined 200 pounds and containing what was then a sizable share of Egypt’s reserve of U.S. currency.

In 2017, Justice Department officials were briefed on initial reports from the CIA which suggested that Sisi had sought to send money to Trump. The case was then set to none other than Robert Muller who was already investigating the Trump campaign’s link to Russia.

Muller formulated the team and dubbed it as Team 10. The group began looking for signs of the alleged transfer of the same amount — searching for evidence of the money either leaving Egypt or arriving with Trump. However, the former president’s bank records offered no evidence that Trump had taken money from Egypt and with limited evidence, the case went nowhere.

In June 2020, Barr was appointed another prosecutor in the case who ultimately called off the probe citing “a lack of sufficient evidence to prove this case beyond a reasonable doubt.”

In a separate interview with The Washington Post, Michael Sherwin, the then-acting U.S. attorney who closed the case and a veteran prosecutor of complicated national security cases, said he had previously closed somewhere sufficient evidence never materialized. “I made the same decision here and I stand by it,” Sherwin averred.

Egypt’s influence in the US

It is pertinent to note that Sisi’s ambition to influence the work of American government officials has become more prominent in recent years with the bribery conviction of Senator Bob Menendez, the former chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Menendez was caught read-handed due to such sketchy deals.

Interestingly, throughout his presidency, Trump shifted US policy in ways that benefited the Sis, a man who he has called his “favourite dictator” in the past. In 2018, Trump’s State Department released $195 million in military aid that the US had been withholding over human rights violations.

The matter is concerning because if this turns out to be true, Trump has potentially violated Federal law that bans US candidates from taking foreign funds.

How Egypt and Trump’s campaign reacted 

When questioned about the matter a spokesperson for Donald Trump blamed “Deep State Trump-haters and bad faith actors” for the whole chaos. “The investigation referenced found no wrongdoing and was closed,” Steven Cheung told The Washington Post.

“None of the allegations or insinuations being reported on have any basis in fact. The Washington Post is consistently played for suckers by Deep State Trump-haters and bad faith actors peddling hoaxes and shams," he added.

Another spokesperson for the former president, Jason Miller, said then: “President Trump has never received a penny from Egypt.” Meanwhile, an Egyptian government spokesperson declined to answer the questions.

“It is inappropriate to comment or refer to rulings issued by the judiciary system or procedures and reports taken by Justice Departments” in other countries, wrote Ayman Walash, the director of the Egyptian government’s Foreign Press Centre in an email to the American news outlet.